Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday January 12, 2012 @04:01AM
from the rollin-all-night-long dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The United Kingdom has given the green light to the first phase of its proposed High Speed Two train line. In response to environmental concerns, the route for HS2 will now include extra tunneling in the first 90 miles, so not to disrupt the natural beauty of the English countryside. The first phase will connect London to Birmingham and could be functional by 2026."

They don't have to nationalise it, just impose caps on fares and mandate track improvements (you know, the ones the taxpayer spends a few hundred million pounds on every few years) actually be completed. Then, if the companies do go bust and no one will buy them, I suppose they could be nationalised...

Except Labour did effectively renationalise Network Rail when they forced Railtrack into administration and then created Network Rail to take its place paying £500m in the process. However they couldn't call it nationalisation otherwise they would have had to pay an extra £1.5bn to the shareholders, so instead they created a really convoluted management structure but still get to have their say in how it is run due to the government paying for various projects and by being able to appoint a director that other members cannot remove. Network Rails debts (all £20bn) are also underwritten by the government. Network Rail receives something in the region of £5bn a year in taxpayers money on top of the revenue collected from the tain operators.

So the tracks, signalling and numerous stations are all state owned and state run. And yet the regulator says that Network Rail is significantly less efficient than other track operators across Europe (some 30+% less efficient), and we still have massive infrastructure problems in the UK.

The train operators are pretty dire, thanks to privatisation that didn't include competition at the passenger level which makes it a state sanctioned monopoly, but it is laughable to suggest that things were any better when the entire show was publicly run or that Network Rail are doing any better. The UK government, or more rightly the civil service as this spans multiple governments, doesn't exactly have a stellar record in delivering value for money or even just good services let alone large scale projects. Can you name one major project that has come in under budget or ahead of schedule? The vast majority end in failure, massively late, massively over budget, or some combination of all three.

No matter how deep you dive into the UK's rail industry it just gets worse.Another example (from my brother in law who works for the railways) is the local operators lease the rolling stock, they are not allowed to own it. For round numbers it's about £1 million a year for a carriage that costs about £10 million new.However the carriages were already paid for. Some of them are 25+ years old, and the companies that own the stock have little incentive to invest in new stock, because, well why woul

Blame that on John Major, breaking up the rail system and selling all the money-making parts off for pennies on the pound to private industry, then rolling up all the complex and expensive stuff into Railtrack.

An ideal way to privatise profit and nationalise risk.

BR needed modernisation badly, but privatisation was not it the answer there - at least not the way it was done.

Well, the government is really good at poorly thought out privatisation that.

They have done exactly the same to Royal Mail. Forced them to sell off the profitable part (collecting money for letters), and forced them to continue the difficult expensive part (delivering them) for a very low fixed fee. Of course now they want to privatise it because it is loss making.

I suspect exactly the same will happen as happened with Railtrack. They will give good payouts to the directors, fail to meet targets, get fined

Blame that on John Major, breaking up the rail system and selling all the money-making parts off for pennies on the pound to private industry, then rolling up all the complex and expensive stuff into Railtrack.

Well done for blaming John Major..... A lot of people wrongly accuse Thatcher for the privatization of the rail, but She always tried to resist that, even stating that privatization of rail would be its Waterloo.

I don't think so. It was rather like trying to save a troubled supermarket by cutting the loss leaders. Do that, and there will be less customers in the store to buy the profitable products. A profitable supermarket, like Tesco or Asda has lots of loss-leaders.

Branch lines were loss-leaders for the main lines. Close a branch line that runs near to where someone lives, and that person is no longer a customer for the main line.

Beeching was supposed to make the Railways profitable again. It didn't. And that's the reason why.

Now with so much congestion on the roads, we could really do with those branch lines again. Such a shame they were lost.

Yup. They cut it to save £6000 of loss, and then lost £24000 of income on the main line because the accountants were too stupid to understand that just about every single passenger was going on to London. Now, in 2012, that would be a very profitable line through expensive Hertfordshire villages.

British accountants frequently combine arrogance with ignorance; their inability to understand how businesses really work has been one of the reasons for failure of UK PLC.

Nope. This is basically just going to make the normal train service worse if anything as train companies stop offering services that compete with it in order to make more money from the more expensive tickets on the new high speed line.

If germany hadn't been defeated do you think Hitler would have stopped at the atlantic? The nazis and the japanese would invaded and nicely carved up the USA so you'd probably have bullet trains running across your country by now and be eating at McSushi.

Well yes, of course - once the US stopped handing vast amounts of machinery and oil to Germany, beating them was easy. Glad you guys finally decided to come on side once the difficult bit was done, though.

You can thank the exponential growth of bureaucracy over the last 70 years for that. It's the same reason why it took 7 years to build the original World Trade Center and now more than a decade after 9/11, they're "hoping" that it will be almost done by 2020 (19 years after).

The Poles are increasingly doing the middle class jobs. The Russians...the oligarchs will loan the money to the Government so that the Government won't extradite them to Russia when Putin needs a rouble or two.

Premise: I'm half-Brit half-Italian.A while ago an Italian newspaper compared the time it took to build the Channel Tunnel compared to the Milan Bypass Railway (6 vs 24 years) poking much fun at our (Italian) slowness. Now that Italy has a full high-speed rail link between Turin-Milan-Rome-Naples (which included digging new tunnels in the Appenini mountains) built in less than 20 years (nearly 1000 Km), someone should write a similar article.Obviously these times and distances are laughable compared to France and Japan anyway.

Its capacity and cost. A return from Leeds to london tomorrow will cost £123 [nationalrail.co.uk] off peak. That's just under 200 miles so its chaper to drive. If you want the chapest travel then you would go by coach for £9.50 [nationalexpress.com]. It seems to me that for the same or less than HS2 they could have longer platforms, double decker coaches (like in France) and get the cost down. I would rather have a 2 hour service for about £30 that I could actually use than a 50 minute one for £200.

Good point but enhancing an existing line to improve capacity and speed is far more problematic than building a new line on a greenfield site. I think they realised that after comparing the success of HS1 (Channel tunnel to London) when compared with the West Coast main line upgrade that was taking place at the same time.

- There is a finite limit to the number of trains you can run down any stretch of track. Once you reach that limit (which is quite close on existing track) You have limited options to increase capacity:-

> Make the trains/platforms longer. Good in theory, but requires major changes to existing infrastructure. (Demolition of existing buildings in town centres) Changes in track layout, particularly at terminus stations. Changes in signalling (for longer trains).

> Double decker trains. This requires a change in the loading gauge of the lines. A particular problem in the UK that has a smaller existing track gauge than Europe. This is why double decker trains are widespread in Europe and non-existent in the UK: there simply isn't the room for them. Changing the gauge basically means rebuilding the entire railway, with all the disruption that brings. (i.e. rebuild bridges, overhead lines, all track-side structures, track alignment, platforms....)

Building an entirely new line brings you all of the benefits of longer platforms, double decker trains, and a much higher speed. All without causing any significant disruption to existing lines. It's cheaper in the long run. And it provides a much bigger increase in total capacity and resilience for the money.

the problem is more just that it's old and is still based on design decisions made years ago. the lack of capacity and the higher cost are just by products of this.
The height of trains is limited by all the tunnels about, which will be a major engineering work to increase, the length is limited by most platforms and the width is limited by the gauge. these things were all chosen a long time ago and we just keep trying to sticky plaster over it.
basically, we got stiffed because we were early adopters

It seems to me that for the same or less than HS2 they could have longer platforms, double decker coaches (like in France) and get the cost down.

Longer platforms are coming, where possible and sensible, but double decker coaches aren't. The problem is that the standard size of space for a train (i.e., the size of tunnels and bridges) is enough smaller in the UK that there's not enough room to put a double decker coach through it. Moreover, the UK uses bridges very heavily by comparison with much of the world.

I would rather have a 2 hour service for about £30 that I could actually use than a 50 minute one for £200.

Yes, but if you go two weeks further out (and are willing to travel outside peak times) there's a fare on the same route for £22.60. (I'm not sure if that's a return or a single; the website's interface isn't quite as clear on that as I would want.) Booking at the last minute is costly, but booking well ahead is pretty cheap.

I wonder if there will be enough room for DB and Thalys trains to run from Cologne or Paris right through to Manchester. Finally some competition. Looking for to the DB trains coming through the tunnel to London next year (or is it 2014?). Eurostar is pretty out-dated, and the stop in Brussels Midi is really grating after a while.

This HS2 line is embarrassingly late, and it's still years away. The UK was years behind our neighbours when the Eurostar route was

"I wonder if there will be enough room for DB and Thalys trains to run from Cologne or Paris right through to Manchester."

Yup - HS2 is being built to UIC loading gauge so as long as they have the foresight to link up to HS1 that should be physically possible. Whether the company running HS2 will allow it or try and charge foreign operators silly money for track access is another matter of course.

And again the car wins, because you don't have to plan a 200 mile day journey 2 weeks in advance...

The rail network in the UK is really quite poor - let me detail two separate journeys for you which literally made me get a car (and that was no little decision, as it also meant learning to drive;) )...

The first one involved travel from Leicester to Bath, ticket cost was about Â£40 return. The journey from Bath to Bristol was fine, but then the Virgin train to Birmingham arrived. Full to the brim. My booked and reserved seat was a waste. The conductor announced that the train would not e leaving until enough people got off, but there was no replacement and the next train was an hour wait ( and no guarantee it wouldn't also be full). Eventually I get to Birmingham, where the train to Leicester has nine platform alterations, with the last alteration coming as the train left the station from a platform we could see but not get to! Another missed train, another wait.

The trip back from Leicester to Bath was all done on rail replacement transport - in other word, busses. Fantastic. National Express do a direct service for a tenner, but I had to pay way more than that for four separate stages.

The second journey on the same route, from Leicester to Bath, got me to Bristol - and there I stayed for eight hours, because of a signalling failure on the South West line, where the train was coming from.

Eventually a train turned up after 4 hours, and everyone piled on. Then the conductor announced that the train that had been delayed was behind this train and would be arriving at the platform directly after the current train had left, and anyone with tickets for that train should get off and take it. As I had an "ultra cheap" ticket which required me to take a specific train, I had the choice of staying on and being stiffed for another ticket, or getting on the next train as promised.

I got off, and the train left. Immediately then "my" train had another hour delay announced. They had lied.

In both circumstances, the train companies never bothered to reply to my complaints.

Well, I live in Surrey, and regularly travel between Woking, Guildford, London, Oxford and Cambridge (I don't have a car). And I literally can't remember the last time a train I wanted to travel on was cancelled, or sufficiently late that I missed a connection or important connection.

Although in fairness I must point out that, despite running on time, First Capital Connect trains from Kings Cross to Cambridge are incredibly shitty and crowded.

The requirement for "data" doesn't apply if the outcome is a person modifying their behaviour based on their own experiences.

If I have several bad experiences, it doesn't matter to me one bit that other people are having good experiences - it doesn't change my experience at all. Statistically my experience might not rise above being an outlier, but it's still my experience and that is what I base further behaviours on.

I'm glad you enjoy good experiences on the railways. It doesn't affect myself at all.

Prices for tomorrow are always expensive, but if you book in advance it goes down a lot. Edit that for two weeks from now and the cheapest fare is £88.50 - still not cheap, but less than the price of 70 litres of petrol, so probably not much cheaper to drive. Swansea to London return cost me £50 and speed is the irritating part - the train averages about 60 miles per hour. It takes 3 hours to go from Swansea to London, but only 2 hours to go from London to Brussels, which is a little bit furt

Note that the biggest problem with that route is the section between Cardiff and Swansea, where the terrain is so hilly that the only way to speed up the existing tortuous train route would be to rebuild it entirely with lots of tunnels. Note that the main reason that the government recently decided not to electrify that section was that the increased speed benefits of lighter, faster electric trains would not be realised on that section of line.

This is what is called a "Keynesian stimulus program"[2]. It's purpose is to spend 300 billion[1] into the economy in order to inflate the national debt away, save the banks and the contractors. At the taxpayers and citizens expense, the currency will be devalued causing inflation and taxpayers will have to service increased interest payments. The people who will be hit hardest by the additional inflation and taxation are the old, and the poor.

Saving 20 mins between Birmingham and London is not the point of HS2. The reason for HS2 is to get Birmingham London passengers off the West Coast Mainline, to leave more space for local services that use the same line.

To use a car analogy, to drive from London to Birmingham, you can either use the motorways or drive on A roads. The motorways are designed for long distance traffic, and the A roads are for local traffic.

The stretch to bitmingham will cost 15bn and save 40 (not 20) minutes, not to mention increasing capacity. The Full cost is for the full plan is for the extension to Manchester and Leeds which will cost 32bn and save considerably more time and also add capacity.

The mainline is running close to capacity, and only the government has the foresight and funds to spend money on large infrastructure projects.

Since you're likely to troll me with the same assertion as before, what do you propose should be done to increase capacity?

This is what is called a "Keynesian stimulus program"[2]. It's purpose is to spend 300 billion[1] into the economy in order to inflate the national debt away, save the banks and the contractors. At the taxpayers and citizens expense, the currency will be devalued causing inflation and taxpayers will have to service increased interest payments. The people who will be hit hardest by the additional inflation and taxation are the old, and the poor.

Wow, are you a politician, or perhaps a Daily Mail writer? This is the exact same generic argument used against anything that the government ever does in this country and it has never once happened that way on the scale you suggest. If it did it would bankrupt the country, and I have a feeling they might stop a fair way short of that. How many multi-billion pound projects can you name where the cost was ten times what was originally budgeted for, outside of our nuclear weapons?

No, the poor don't have access to significant credit, the poor live in a cash society. They can't afford debts, banks don't lend poor people money. They lend rich people money. The wealthier you are the more collateral you have and the better able you are to service debt. Banks will lend wealthy people lots of money and the wealthy do very well from inflation. Assets: Property valuations, stocks, dividends, commodities all increase. Debts, as you mentioned are devalued.

Only if the train gets so long that it doesn't fit between two signals! That's pretty rare, and in the places where it does happen they cope just fine with having trains in two signal blocks at once. (In any case, goods trains with a full load of containers get much longer than any passenger train.) The real constraint on signal separation is the ability of trains to come to a stop safely, and the real constraint on train length is platform length and the fact that they'll have to move signals at the end of

Thing is, rail capacity has been a problem for decades, double decker trains are an obvious solution, but when they build a new bridge over a rail line, they still build it to fit a single decker train under it.

They should have simply mandated 20 years ago, all future infrastructure should be capable of taking a reasonable height double decker train and at least some of that infrastructure would by now be already in place.

They are building the line to the European loading gauge. The line is designed to be fully compatible with European very-high-speed lines, as DB and SNCF have expressed an interest in running through trains from European cities to Birmingham through the Channel Tunnel once the Eurotunnel monopoly expires. Additionally, the line is being built to serve very long trains (up to 12 European-length carriages).

All-in-all, the wider/taller loading gauge (which provides the option for double-decker carriages) and

Having been following the progress of HS2 through Parliament, I think it's safe to assume that the main means of transport that it will be enable will be yachts for the various Ministers, CEOs and lobbyists concerned in railroading (ho ho) it through.

which will benefit anyone but the middle class or poor. High Speed rail rarely if ever pays for itself and never benefits those who the politicians claim its aimed at. If anything it has been shown in countries like Spain is that in concentrates wealth in already wealthy cities because it gives greater ease of mobility to those who already have the wealth. Think, businessmen no longer needing to live in the city they work in but instead they can live in a resort style city or coastal city usually connected

The less well off can still use the existing routes on the conventional lines, which will take longer and on older trains but will still exist once the high speed project is live. If the high speed train is a great success, then some capacity on existing lines can be made spare or re-allocated for regional and suburban services that currently run on the same lines as the intercity service. What I actually worry about is that the added capacity encourages more people and companies to have more trips into London, where they will use the tube to get to their final destinations and that is really hard to upgrade.

Or course this will cost billions more and reducing time to Birmingham for that amount is pointless - Train delays will add this back on. It's just a shame by 2030 that amount of money only buys a system which is years old by today's standards. Why not aim higher? Or build in space to allow for greater. It will need to be done at some point.

Make work, tax pump up the economy money debt should be used to build some infrastructure. Infrastructure second to none to get something that will benefit generations

Lots of beautiful English countryside south of Manchester. Also lots of stockbrokers / rich city types who don't want their countryside fantasy shattered by noisy development work. A bit like the rich lords and ladies 150 years ago who complained about their views being ruined the first time they put railway lines across the land.

Though to be fair there are ecological concerns to be taken into account this time round seeing as we've got less countryside left.

Yes, the HS2 tunnels are an expensive sop to rich Conservative donors. But the idea has history. On its way through Bath, the Kennet and Avon Canal is hidden away as much as possible so that the Jane Austen crowd didn't have to look at the grubby people who brought their coal in. The railway followed the same route. And the main road from Bath to the M4 has a hideous cutting which is visible from the city, but was built purely for the benefit of a pair of BBC journalists who lived on the hill opposite. Millions were wasted...

Which is why it is funny in a way that Lord Astor has suggested that HS2 is unnecessary and an improved Internet backbone for better video conferencing would be a more sensible use of the money. The fibre link from London to Birmingham could easily be laid along the existing railway or canal network.

Let's just make it clear how much of a waste of money this actually is.

Â£33bn ($50bn USD), for a new train line between only two cities, that wont be ready for 12 years, and when it does, shaves only a mere 20minutes or so off the journey.

I assume a company like Capita is getting the contract? The same Capita that runs sizable portions of the rest of our train network along with the companies that run the remaining parts of it for 33% more than our European neighbours who have more reliable, more

As someone else has said, it's 40 minutes, not 20. And obviously, that's far from the only benefit of HS2 -- self-evidently, it's a huge increase in capacity. Capacity is much more important than speed.

As pointed out by the AC, but I'll post while logged in, the £33bn is for the full network. It's approximately £15bn for the London-Birmingham route.

As is typical for private industry, they won't undertake such a project because they can't see past next quarter's balance statement, but something needed to be done - the increase in rail traffic is going to overtake the capacity of the current lines in the coming future (over 10 to 15 years) and alternative options such as lengthening platforms an

Though to be fair there are ecological concerns to be taken into account this time round seeing as we've got less countryside left.

The easiest way to fix that is to get some farmers in the area to take some land out of production and just leave it alone. Within a few decades, you'll have woodland there as that's the natural state for most of the UK anyway (that which isn't bare rock or open water). Sure it won't be undisturbed natural woodland but there's almost none of that anyway; too many hundreds of years of human interference have already been and gone.

Sure it won't be undisturbed natural woodland but there's almost none of that anyway; too many hundreds of years of human interference have already been and gone.

Indeed. Most people will look at a British countryside scene and mutter words like "unspoilt" or "natural when it's really nothing of the sort.

- almost all grazing land would naturally be forest
- most of our forests are managed conifers being grown for timber. Indigenous forestry is deciduous.
- hedges, dry stone walls are pretty, but they ain't natural.
- a typical chocolate box scene will include roads (OK, not motorways...), trains etc.

Generous? Homes will be affected along the entire length, but it's not the Birmingham end of the line that's getting concessions with underground tunnels etc. Imagine you've put everything you have into an even more modest home that backs onto some farmland, and take great pleasure in having your breakfast looking out over the grazing sheep and the thicket of trees on the horizon. Then one day you're told that your view is going to be of a grey concrete wall, behind which there will be a train line. Then you find out that the people with comparatively far less modest homes in a comparatively far richer part of the country had their piece of line buried to preserve their views (partially at your expense as a tax payer). And do you think they'll do this in Manchester or Leeds? You'll be lucky to have even the concrete wall to look at, probably a rusty chainlink fence. This is nothing to do with general pleasantness, it's to do with the Conservatives looking after their own as usual. According to them the public sector is a horrible drain on society, but they have no qualms about raiding it to make their own lives easier at the expense of the rest of the country. They should be leading by example and refusing to let the public pay extra for something that benefits so few.

You bought the house and land. You didn't buy the view. You might think you did - you may have paid more because the view was there. And yet the view didn't belong to the person that sold you the property, so you did not buy it.

Your "view" belongs to other people. All those people who's property it is that you are looking at when you say "view".

If you get a perceptible reduction in daylight because of this wall, or significant noise from the trains, then for sure that deserves compensation. But loss (or deg

You probably haven't been to much south of Manchester either. There's the peak district [google.co.uk], dartmoor [google.co.uk], norfolk [google.co.uk], The chilterns [google.co.uk] (the ones that the HS2 protesters worry about), and the south downs [google.co.uk] to name just a few.

It is of dubious value anyway. They say that it'll cut the journey time down to 50 minutes. It's only 100 miles or 160 km. That's a little over 100 miles per hour, but in theory the current trains are capable of 125 miles per hour which means the journey should take 48 minutes *with the current trains*. But on a 100 mile journey most of the time is spent stopping and starting or stopping at intermediate stations. Perhaps they should consider simply improving the current track, or running express trains?

England south and east of Manchester is so overcrowded that there is not one square foot of wilderness left.

Wilderness? You must be American. Southern England hasn't had any wilderness for hundreds of years, and it's to do with farming not houses. You may find the English countryside rather tame compared with the Rocky Mountains or whatever, but we like it.

Yes, transport in general in the UK is a mess...As was reported recently, trains cost massively more in the UK than in other european countries, and if you live outside of a large city public transport is even worse or may be entirely lacking.

Concorde cut the journey time to new york in half, and yet it's no longer flying... Faster transport isn't whats needed, we need to decrease distances, decrease congestion and most importantly decrease the need to travel.

Encourage home working... Most office jobs can be done from anywhere with an internet connection and phoneline...Stagger working hours - don't have everyone travel in for 9am, that just causes mass congestion at specific times and creates a horrendously inefficient transport system where the extra capacity to handle peak traffic is simply wasted at other times. Many staff never need to interact directly with third parties and so have no reason to be at work 9-5.Convince businesses to get over this stupid obsession of having offices in central london (or other large cities), it doesn't make your company look prestigious it just increases costs and hinders your recruitment process because people are put off by the horrendous commute and will usually demand more money for working there. Instead, build your offices in small business parks located outside the centre of cities, not only are these considerably cheaper but there is generally affordable housing within a short distance. I personally have turned down several job offers that required commuting to central london.

Encourage home working... Most office jobs can be done from anywhere with an internet connection and phoneline...

As somebody who did this for 10 years, let me tell you it's not a good idea as a permanent solution for most people. I only do it now if my early morning meetings leave me in my PJs at lunchtime. Some flexibility is good, but it does disrupt communications.

Many staff never need to interact directly with third parties and so have no reason to be at work 9-5.

"his is why I live in cycling distance and 25km/day is good for my health"

Good for your heart maybe, not so much for your lungs deep breathing in all those PM10s from diesel vehicles. Drivers will be breathing the same air but they're not breathing heavily so the particles don't go down so far and get lodged.

If we could go further in this out of the box thinking, changing the work hours to 7 a day and then 6 a day, with different people starting and ending work at different times would surely improve the overcrowding in all sorts of transport. If having a 4 day work week is too radical to consider, just changing the routine to having a day week with 6 hours work day with a minor or no stop for lunch would have a major impact in the quality of life.

In reality it will cost far, far less than that, the real figure is likely well under Â£20bn. That was a grossly inflated figure to try and push the government into giving BT as much money as possible to go ahead with the rollout. Som

Certainly more should be invested in broadband but not instead of HS2. The pros/cons of additional transport capacity are fairly clear and it is easy to see that this is required given current usage trends. Understanding the pros/cons of fast internet requires some insight into future changes to the way society operates so is harder to justify to the public. Still, it should be persued because of the potential that it offers.

Clearly, the advent of the internet has not done anything to reduce rail usage i

The Chilterns are bumps in an otherwise pancake-flat landnonscape. "Officially designated" or not, they are as ugly as a badly paved sidewalk. I like to designate "beauty" for myself, and not leave that to the government.